China’s Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class | The New Yorker
[Note: As always, please read Peter Hessler’s essay in full for its glory. End Note]
For a Chinese person born in the nineteen-seventies, success sometimes felt like an accident.
North’s role was to negotiate with residents, figuring out the fee structure for each elevator project. He told me that the process is complicated because, unlike in the past, most buildings no longer belong to Communist-style work units. Many residents had moved from the countryside, and their lack of familiarity with the people around them was part of the shift to city life.
Most of them had studied English for seven or more years before encountering a native speaker, and they had come up with their own foreign names. Some of these had a literal or symbolic meaning, in the manner of a Chinese poet’s biming, or pen name. North had selected his name in part because it’s the traditional direction of authority in China: faraway Beijing. He had also read in a history book that there was once a British Prime Minister named North. He wasn’t aware that Frederick North, the Earl of Guilford, was mostly distinguished by having held office during the period in which the empire lost its American colonies.
When I visited him in 1997, during his first year on the job, the “t” had fallen off the large English sign at the company’s entrance. It didn’t seem promising that my former monitor was earning thirty-three dollars a month at a firm that identified itself as “Fuling Ho Pickled Mustard Tuber.”
I kept a list with the home addresses of more than a hundred former students. Every six months, I wrote a group letter, addressing each envelope by hand, a process that took hours because of my poor Chinese calligraphy. The responses arrived in cheap brown paper envelopes, postmarked from places I had never heard of: Lanjiang, Yingye, Chayuan.
Back then, nobody spoke of algorithms, but clearly there had been some kind of large-scale calculation: by identifying bright kids in rural areas and pulling them out of the normal educational track, the government produced primary-school teachers who were fully licensed by the age of eighteen. Of course, some of them were bright enough to realize that they were essentially being sacrificed for the sake of the larger system. Linda, by virtue of scoring lower than her desk mate, had ended up with more education and a much better job.
During my first years in Beijing, letters often described courtships and marriages. Like most rural Chinese, the students usually married early, and they could come across as brutal realists
Their English study materials seemed to include a steady diet of inspirational passages. In letters, kids often mixed and matched quotes, and they had a fondness for boom-time writers whose subject had been the interior of another country long ago. The sixteen-year-old girl took some words from William Allen White, a Kansan who became a leader of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. Other descriptions—the force of the wind, the slash of the rain—came from Hamlin Garland, a contemporary of White’s who wrote about hardworking Midwestern farmers.
In 2014, I sent a long questionnaire to about eighty of the people I had taught. Thirty responded, and of those twenty-eight owned both an apartment and a car, and their median household income was nearly eighteen thousand dollars. **This year, when I asked the question again, the median income was more than thirty-five thousand dollars. **Back in the late nineteen-nineties, they had usually started out with an annual salary of around five hundred dollars.
Despite my students’ transition to urban life and prosperity, their thinking and values still follow many patterns that I associate with rural Chinese. In 2014, I asked respondents to define their social class, and only eight out of thirty identified as middle class or higher. Twenty-two defined themselves with terms like “proletariat,” “low class,” “down class,” “poverty class,” “poor,” and “we belong to nothing.” According to the World Bank, more than eight hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty, but the concept of a middle class is still relatively new. And, for many of my students, the trauma of having been poor seems hard to shake. The boy who wrote me the letter about his harrowing boat journey to Zhejiang, during which Sichuanese migrants slept in the toilet, eventually learned fluent English, became a private-school teacher with a salary of around eighty thousand dollars, and owned three apartments and a car, without any debt. But on the survey he responded, “We belong to lower class.”
Unlike the Abrahamic religions, pre-Communist Chinese traditions of faith didn’t emphasize exclusivity, and I recognized this quality in my students. Sometimes they shopped around. “I think the Chinese local God works much better than Jesus,” one man wrote, after visiting both temples and churches. They tended to be flexible in their faith. “I want to believe in Jesus, but there is no church here,” one woman wrote. “So I have to believe in the Chinese God.”
In 2017, when I asked my former students to identify China’s biggest success in the previous decade, nobody mentioned education. The most common answers were all related to development: transport, infrastructure, urbanization.
But it’s remarkable how many of them remain in education. From surveys and from my conversations with North and others, I estimate that more than ninety per cent of my former students still work as teachers.
Despite all the teachers’ complaints about materials, when I asked them to rate their job satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the average response was 7.9.
In China, generations are not usually named. There’s no equivalent of boomers, or Gen X, or millennials: the Chinese media tends to identify a cohort simply by its decade of birth. But I think of my Fuling students as part of a group that could be called the reform generation.
For the reform generation, even the most spectacular success stories are often accompanied by some kind of sadness or loss. But this side of the experience is usually left unspoken.
“It’s hard to believe that this was where the highest officials lived,” Anry said. “It seemed so nice to us in those days.” Before heading back to the Mercedes, North pointed out the stairwell’s exterior wall. He said, “You could put an elevator there.”
Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win
macOS 12.1 manages the four E cores in the original M1 chip, and the two in the new M1 Pro, differently.
In response to a high load of low QoS processes, frequency of E cores in the original M1 chip remains about 1000 MHz;
[while] frequency of E cores in the M1 Pro is doubled to about 2000 MHz.
This management policy ensures that demanding background processes with low QoS can complete in similar times on the original M1 and M1 Pro chips.
In response to a spillover load of high QoS processes from the P cores, frequency of E cores in the M1 Pro is increased to the maximum of 2064 MHz.
When running at 100% active residency and maximum frequency,
the cluster of 2 E cores in the M1 Pro consumes 210 mW of power;
[while] each cluster of 4 P cores in the M1 Pro consumes 4 W of power.
Although there’s insufficient evidence here to conclude that all cores within a cluster are run at exactly the same frequency,
their frequencies don’t appear to differ by much.
Within a cluster, active residencies normally remain broadly similar but aren’t as closely correlated as frequencies.
In tight loops of predominantly floating-point code, accessing only registers as used here,
performance measured by timing correlates closely with that measured by powermetrics as instructions retired.
The two E cores in an M1 Pro, when at 100% active residency and maximum frequency can outperform a single P core at 100% active residency and maximum frequency,
while using one fifth of the power.
The Afghans America Left Behind
Sometimes men claiming to be Taliban called in to a talk show she had begun hosting for the BBC. They threatened her and others, saying that it was against Islamic law for women to be on the radio. But often, she said, they ended up telling her how much they loved the talk show, or her voice. She learned to end the discussions by asking if they had a song request, and they usually did. “Not everyone was as hard line as the leaders,” she told me. Eventually, a distant cousin recognized her on the radio, and told another cousin that he was going to kill her. She travelled to the village to confront him, shaming him for his “sinister plots,” and he seemed to back down. “I didn’t think anything could harm me,” she said.
To its allies, America has often proved a dangerous friend.Shifting foreign-policy objectives have frequently led the U.S. to abandon the civilian populations it previously vowed to protect
We travelled around Afghanistan collecting folk poems called landays, which are traditionally narrated from a woman’s perspective and offered in song. One begins, “When sisters sit together they always praise their brothers / When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.” In our travels, we noticed how decades of occupation had seeped into the country’s poetry. Women sang of falling in love with British, Russian, and American soldiers, and then being betrayed by them. They recited poetry about drones—in Pashto, bipilot—and described Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, whose clothes were “made of dollars.” In a poem that was popular on Facebook, an aggrieved woman says to her lover, “My darling, you are just like America! / You are guilty. I apologize.”
In the weeks after I left Afghanistan, Faqeer, sensing that she was being followed again, dressed more conservatively. But one morning, in July of 2013, the Taliban posted a letter on her gate, on letterhead from “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” “We have been following you for the last eight years that you have been working with the Americans,” the letter began. It cited her work with me: “Because you have been seen with an American woman . . . now you will see the punishment for your actions.” She had been sentenced to death. “We are informing you that, if you are seen outside your house, you will be killed, according to Islamic law. You will not be excused anymore.”
She left dressed as a bride, wearing the gold she’d been quietly buying for years in anticipation of this moment. The bangles and necklaces that I had judged frivolous proved to be just the opposite: they were her mobile bank.
This past spring, in the leadup to the U.S. withdrawal, the State Department processed more than five thousand S.I.V.s—more than at any point in history, but not enough to address the logjam. It eventually launched an aggressive calling campaign to reach U.S. citizens in Afghanistan.
Women who had worked with the U.S. were at particular risk. Local clerics gave speeches on the radio urging that they be kidnapped and married off to Taliban fighters.
I joined their effort and, in several days, we raised the one and a half million dollars necessary to charter an Airbus A340. (Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker, contributed, as did dozens of individuals, media organizations, and nonprofits.) The easiest part was filling the seats: we were flooded with requests from Afghans at extreme risk, including several who had already survived assassination attempts. The final manifest included women’s-rights advocates, journalists, high-profile government employees, judges being hunted by the Taliban fighters they’d convicted, female doctors, and the stars of the film adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner.” It was daunting to work on such sensitive operations. But sometimes strangers appeared in encrypted chats, using code names like Mike or Matt, and giving reassurance about having “eyes” on the convoys or offering “handshakes” at the gate. We realized that there were current and former intelligence officers and other government officials working behind the scenes to insure the safety of the refugees.
On August 22nd, Mina packed some clothes and, under each sleeve, slipped a stack of gold bangles that her sister had instructed her to buy. When families began to arrive at her home, the men stood in the street, and the women and children waited inside. It was crowded and noisy, and she warned them to be quiet: “If our neighbors hear so many people here, they will report us to the Taliban.” The bus was late, and Taliban officials asked the men outside where they were headed. “We’re going to a wedding,” a passenger said. This wedding ruse soon became commonplace, and Vikram joked, “How many weddings does the Taliban think there could possibly be?”
The Navy Seals couldn’t reach the convoy of buses through the crowd. Instead, they told Mina and the others to get out and run. “Better move before anyone sees this gate open,” Hock wrote. Mina had her three older children hold hands and instructed them to run as fast as they could. “We are right behind you,” she said. The family slipped through the gate, which closed after them. Mina sent her sister a voice message saying, “We are inside the airport and we are safe now.”
The family was shuttled through the system of “lily pads,” travelling from one military base to another. They had gone from Doha to Germany, then to D.C., sixty miles from Faqeer’s home, then, inexplicably, to Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, where they spent seven weeks living in a tent. “We kept wondering when we would get to the real America,” Mina said. An Afghan American medical professional working with refugees told me, “It’s like a screwed-up Ellis Island.”
Biden has touted the effort as “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history”; the U.S. has helped more than a hundred and twenty thousand people flee. Still, the government has acknowledged that, as of this month, a handful of U.S. citizens remained in the country, along with fourteen thousand green-card holders, thirty thousand Afghans with vetted S.I.V.s, and thirty thousand who have applied. “With their immediate families, this could easily be over a hundred and fifty thousand people,” Vikram told me. An untold number of Afghans endangered by their work also remain, including human-rights advocates, journalists, former members of the Afghan military, and judges.
The Grammarphobia Blog: Swear Like a Sailor
Q: Why do we say someone who cusses a lot “swears (or curses) like a sailor (or trooper, soldier, marine)”? Do people in the military cuss more than others?
many of the “swear like a …” and “curse like a …” usages refer to a sailor, trooper, soldier, or marine, but not all of them.
We’ve seen versions of the expression applied to a docker, drunken monk, fishwife, mule-skinner, pirate, porter, preacher’s son, stevedore, termagant, and more.
The two most common versions are “swear like a sailor” and “swear like a trooper,” according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer
Probably because troopers and sailors had reputations for boorish language and behavior when the two phrases showed up (the “trooper” one in the 18th century and the “sailor” in the 19th).
“The troopers in this term were the cavalry, who were singled out for their foul language from the early 1700s on.”
“A trooper was originally (mid 17th century) a private soldier in a cavalry unit, and from the mid 18th century was proverbial for coarse behaviour and bad language.”
In fact, many soldiers still speak an expletive-ridden language that the author Tom Wolfe referred to as “Army Creole.”
Sailors on civilian or military vessels have had a similar reputation
A 2016 book Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750 to 1850, cites 18th-century reports of the “wicked conversation,” “carnal songs,” “ill language,” and “profane language” of sailors, especially their rampant use of the expression “damn son of a bitch.”
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